Life hacks are all the rage today, with a number of YouTube videos and Buzzfeed articles dedicated to short cuts and innovative uses for everything and anything – from basic office supplies to vegetable and fruit skins to even the reuse of everyday, mundane objects What few of us realise is that our Sri Lankan ancestors – or even Sri ...
Meter taxis came as a blessing – no more haggling with tuk drivers, no obscene price monopolies and no unpleasant scenes when you added a few extra stops to the list. Looking back, many of you would have realised that travelling by tuk tuks was way more expensive back in the day. Without meters, we often paid twice as much ...
Tying up the series on photographs of Sri Lanka by foreign photographers is Chris Sorensen. Interestingly, most Chris’s career was spent in front of the lens as a model and an actor. But having worked with professional photographers Chris learnt more about photography and discovered he enjoyed time behind the lens as well. Once bitten by the photography bug almost ...
We at Roar like to keep an eye out for what’s hot, what’s not and what’s trending on the interwebs. Going #viral right now is this video from Voice.Print that’s racked up 100,000 views in less than 12 hours. Showing incredible vocal talent, the boys take us on a mashup of the Sinhalese music hits from the 1950 right ...
The paradise island is great for a bunch of reasons – sun, sand, sarongs, and pol sambol. Unfortunately, with great curry comes great obscurity, and Sri Lanka’s not as well known as it deserves to be. The island’s very name sounds exotic and distant enough for it to be mentioned intermittently in shows and movies, albeit VERY inaccurately. Growing up, ...
Often, the first image the word ‘shipwreck’ conjures up is the Titanic or something inspired by The Little Mermaid. Picture a looming hulk on the seabed rife with little treasures from a time long forgotten. Such images are deemed fantastical, belonging to the realm of cartoons, movies, books and perhaps even dreams. Yet, for a select few, this world is ...
We’re Winning And It’s Not A Good Thing. The name of the game is ‘plastic’ and we have been hammering more 6’s in this match than any other nation out there for our size. A report released by the International Business Times ranks Sri Lanka as the 5th largest polluter of plastic to the ocean in 2010 with 1.59 metric ...
History is a painful playground – although practically minute in the eyes of the world, Sri Lanka, too, has seen and suffered more than its fair share of conquests and colonisations. The resulting hangover has, however, left the island with a curious admixture of cultures; a sort of crosspatch heritage where we borrowed the best of certain cultures and made ...
The 2015 parliamentary elections came and went. Results were announced, a new prime minister was sworn in, and a national government was formed; and, depending on whom you ask, the outcome was either great or meh (or terrible if they’re from Kurunegala). The UNP-led coalition managed to send 106 members to parliament, 93 of whom were elected by popular vote from ...
A brief and unreliable history of the glorious facial hair that’s shaped an island The moustache is an integral part of a man’s identity. It’s also often a key part of a leader’s (be it a dubious dictator or your general genocidal maniac) cult of personality or Marxian personenkultus. Interestingly, Marx also sported a fabulous field of facial follicles (both ...
The year 2014 saw laughter, tears, celebration, devastation and change in Sri Lanka in a monumental fashion. From a World Cup win to a Common Candidate in the Presidential Elections and from floods to landslides, Sri Lanka has been through the grinder this year. Did the positives outweigh the negatives or did we all just have our lives shaken around? ...
Everyone’s been talking about it – the masked crusader surfing the Sri Lankan internet, sprinkling readers with a generous amount of laughter, satire and even some curry. This strange creature has brought in that Onion-esque bite to all things Sri Lankan that often border on ridiculous and puerile. No one really knows who he/she is, but often, at the end ...
Pushing the boundaries of human flexibility and teasing gravity, in a display of mind-blowing stunts, Parkour is now officially in Sri Lanka. But what the devil is Parkour, you ask? In its simplest terms, parkour is the act of moving from point A to point B using obstacles in your path to boost your efficiency. That sounds simple enough, but ...
Road.lk, the country’s first and only crowd-sourced traffic alerts service, is about to introduce a novel way for Sri Lankans to commute and, in the process, significantly reduce rush hour traffic in the city and suburbs, via a dynamic, online carpooling system. How Does It Work? You log in to Road.lk and enter your starting location and destination The system ...
While Sri Lanka may be a speck in the Indian Ocean, the history, culture and landscape of our little island has awed tourists for decades. In the recent years, well filmed and edited videos of a tourist’s travels in Lanka has become quite a hit and videos such as We Go Sri Lanka and the more recent Lanka Loving have ...
The previous regime had their sight set on making Sri Lanka the next technology hub in South Asia; perhaps the next Silicon Valley. Whether this is possible or not, Sri Lankans have made it big in the IT world – world over. Names like Chamath Palihapitiya and Rajan Anandan are well known internationally, having made waves (a tidal bore even) ...
Last year, word was going around that Uber, the San Francisco based startup, was entering the Sri Lankan market and behold – turns out it’s true. Uber is officially launching in Colombo today (22nd Oct). Estimated to be worth a hefty $50 billion, Uber is a startup that’s evolved into a global entity with a presence in 340 cities in ...
Even in the age of smartphones and high-speed, ubiquitous connectivity, online dating is still a pretty alien concept to most Sri Lankans; so, unsurprisingly, Tinder, one of the fastest growing players (heh) in the global dating scene, is not exactly huge in this country. As a matter of fact, it was quite a challenge to even find some Sri Lankans ...
Colombo city has undergone rapid urban transformation over the past few years. Skyscrapers and larger-than-life towers have sprung up on every corner and altered our skyline at an unprecedented pace. Some folks welcome this urban development, while others remain somewhat skeptical on what this holds for the future of our city. Then there’s the like of Menaka Senanyake, who are ...
Would you believe that some of Sri Lanka’s most awe-inspiring artwork can found in Buddhist temples in and around Colombo? Leading artists in Buddhist art, Sarlis Master, George Keyt and Solias Mendis have each painted captivating murals in the interior of temples in (and just outside of) Colombo. Each of the three artists were drawn to Buddhism and each were ...
